Tom Klein - Blog - Sustainability Strategy http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com Enabling business evolution and growth posterous.com Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:18:00 -0800 Change, Trauma and Business http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/change-trauma-and-business http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/change-trauma-and-business

Last week I started taking a three-year professional development programme in Somatic Experiencing, a trauma treatment process based on the work of Peter Levine. Though I am not a therapist, my coaching work in change processes brings me into situations regularly in which trauma plays a role, and I had become aware of the need to inform myself better about what I was looking at and how I could support dealing with it productively.

According to Levine, many of the problems people face in their daily lives are expressions not so much of psychological imbalances as of neurological stuck states. When we are confronted with highly emotional situations, our bodies will either go into fight or flight mode to cope. Both reflexes, if successful, help our nervous system to shake off adrenalin and cortisol and so to regulate itself into a renewed state of balance and health. When these reflexes are blocked, for example because the emotion is too sudden or intense or it is not possible to fight or flee, the nervous system will freeze, locking in the emotional charge and with it a state of shock for which the nervous system will try to find compensating patterns that end up as dysfunctions. The focus of trauma therapy is to bring the frozen state of the nervous system back into a "pendalating" process of moving between trauma and resources, so that it can once again regulate itself and integrate the experience now that it could not cope with earlier.

Levine has worked with war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome successfully with the method, and its applications range from integrating physical shocks from accidents to pre- and post-natal problems, to adult psychological issues. For example, one Vietnam veteran, who was the lone survivor of a bombing raid on troops having a barbeque on the last day before evacuation, would feeze in panic at a barbeque at a friend's place when a Cessna flew overhead. Good friends would help him to become aware that he was here and safe, and not in the war situation. In treatment, Levine found that the freezing response, with all its associations, could be brought into pendalating movement, so that the nervous system could integrate the experience and develop alternative responses in the present.

What I experience in change processes is that business initiatives are often massive triggers for trauma states in the people we are working with. To improve a plant competitively, or even save it through restructuring from demise, means to redefine the the roles and responsibilities, the structures and processes in which the people working there earn their living and feed their families. Like the soldier, whose freeze response and panic were triggered by the Cessna, so the sense of loss of a boy whose parents split nastily when he was eight and cost him his home can be triggered in the engineer he has become when the department he has worked and been at home in for the last ten years is dissolved in conflict and he must find his place in the new organization.

Even more critically, new roles and responsibilities require new behaviours and self-understanding from people to fulfil them. Old style managers often show a shocking contempt for needs and the fears of the people involved in the change, and so add new traumas to those which people bring with them to work, threatening them with exactly the things their systems are not able to cope with in the tragic belief that they will get productive results that way. (Watching managers in authoritarian mode, I often can't help but see the trauma in their own lives that they are playing out in their behaviours.) 

But even socially competent leaders, who involve their people in understanding and defining the change, are often overwhelmed by the drama which change can push up to the surface of the organisation. New and useful behaviours cannot be learned by nervous systems in freeze states. The dramas which ensue in the dysfunctional struggle to cope can cost a company its existence.

Today, being a great leader or consultant for innovation will increasingly involve understanding what we trigger in the nervous systems of the people we do business with, and knowing how to respond to the reactions that we get. Understanding how to help someone come out of a stuck state is often rewarded not only with deep thankfulness, but frees up the resources of the person to successfully do fulfilling, creative work. Thinking is embodied, so that the route to good thinking often is achieved by good work on physiology.

The professional development programme I am in will teach us how to work with trauma with individual clients. What I suspect I will do over the course of the three years is to translate the principles and process into work with groups and systems for business.

I will report periodically.

 

 

 

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sat, 26 Nov 2011 13:43:28 -0800 "It will all be okay in the end…" http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/it-will-all-be-okay-in-the-end http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/it-will-all-be-okay-in-the-end
I found this hanging outside the office of a client…

Img_1021

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:28:00 -0700 The Value of Culture http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/the-value-of-culture http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/the-value-of-culture

Part of the big shift which is taking place in business and society derives from a fundamental breakdown in what one could call a piecemeal or single issue approach to life. One of the most common responses of politicians, businesses, but also everyday people to the increasing complexity of life is to focus on the one facet of their reality which they think they understand, and then to push for changes for the better. Single issue strategies are vulnerable to compensating feedback, however, and are never productive in complex systems for the system as a whole. But they are downright dangerous when they are raised to the level of a social ideology. It is, for example, one of the central tenets of market fundamentalism that the striving of individuals to optimize their personal gain results in greater wealth for everyone. Within a properly regulated market system, this is often true. But when the strategy individuals use to lever up their personal gain is to export the costs of their strivings to the system by trashing regulation, everyone becomes poorer, as the system becomes corrupt and collapses from misuse.

In my early days as a consultant, I remember doing sales projects in which managers pushed for improvements in revenues or margins, ignoring the effects on customer relationships or employee motivation. One pharma sales representative told me the story of how, when her managers tried to increase sales by mandating higher doctor visit ratios, one doctor's receptionist blocked her by claiming he wasn't in. She saw patients going in and out of his office, but when ignoring the receptionist she stormed in to see him, she found the doctor climbing out of the ground floor window of his office to go to lunch so that he wouldn't have to run the gauntlet of sales reps stalking him in the waiting room.

Just learning the ropes, I never failed to be surprised at the surprise of managers about the unintended consequences of their piecemeal actions. Later, I learned to be unsurprised at the subsequent blame game and reframing of the facts to explain why things had gone wrong. What never happened, however, was that someone stopped to reflect on the big picture. That was not how they thought, or were incentivised.

What I learned through this and many other experiences was that a single issue focus in a complex world is a recipe for disaster.

As individuals, we easily fall prey to a combination of baser instincts (fear, greed, power, envy...), and simple-mindedness (magical thinking, immediate gratification, results obsession, fundamentalism...), which mixed together lead to disaster. Only cultures--for certain historical periods and for a time in some companies--are able to ameliorate the effects of our baser individual tendencies, by providing the framework of social norms and formal rules, common vision and shared experiences, which help to focus our minds towards, and make our individual behaviours productive of, some healthy common purpose.

In his new book, Boomerang, Michael Lewis explores the nature of several western cultures as mirrored in the financial crisis. Put in a dark room with the endless amounts of money provided by the credit bubble, what, he asks, did the people of various cultures want? What follows is a wonderfully vivid description of various experiences of cultural failure. The behaviour of bankers in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and Germany all exposed shadow sides of their cultures. But Lewis seems to have used the failure of others to prepare for his insights into those at the heart of the crisis in America, as exemplified by California. What Californians wanted, he writes, was a free lunch, and they were willing to bankrupt the state they depend on though a combination of high wage demands and tax revolts to get it.

Thomas Friedman seems to pick up in his new book, That Used to be Us, where Lewis leaves off, describing the formula of social commitments and formal rules which made America great (education, infrastructure, imigration, R&D, and regulation--all government sponsored), and how it is that its downfall started when the people collectively took its eyes off the cultural ball after the fall of the Berlin Wall, becoming complacent, and enabling baser individual strivings at the expense of the common good in the magical fantasy that history had come to an end with the victory of free market economics and the American way. It is in the global South and East that people have learned the positive lesson of America's rise. He writes that Singapore and China, for example, have become successful by focussing on culture, building a collective framework designed to channel individual striving to enable general progress. 

For Friedman, it is not only the focus on culture which he hopes Americans will recover, but an understanding that the project of culture itself has changed. What is needed today to create value in the shifting landscape of production is for people to become "creative creatives" and "creative servers" (as opposed to routinized drones). Innovation is the key, and the path we find behind the door when we open it is one of continuous personal and cultural transformation. Value in the flat, IT networked world, he argues, is created through three faculties: critical thinking, communication, and collaboration, and success depends on the continuous reinvention not only of what we do, but of who we are.

To add value, it would seem, we need only foster the "Three C's." It is not possible to do so on any significant scale, however, in a cultural vacuum. The war of simple-minded positions in America mirrors the failure there of the social contract. Greek prolifigacy, Italian gridlock of stakeholder interests, and the Germans' still unresolved ambivalence about political power describe just some of the cultural challenges facing the West, if it is master the shift. Nothing is more destructive of creativity than corrupt and stupid institutions, as individual creatives are of little use to a society which cannot integrate the processes and the results of their work into the fabric of its social life.

Today, creating value depends on the creativity of people. However, what is effective in developing creativity is not to train skills, but to create environments which enable people, and to support them with insight and mentoring to master the challenges they take on. That is why training and coaching only have a collective effect as a contribution to cultural development, and why it is cultural development for institutional innovation on a global scale that we need to invest in and make our contribution to.

 

 

 

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:10:00 -0700 Getting Practical http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/getting-practical http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/getting-practical

When thinking flows, I find that I often don't know what I'm going to say or write until I listen to what I am saying or read my own texts. Writing this blog often serves that purpose, helping me in bits and bites to get ideas about what I want to do.

As ideas have emerged, a bigger picture has started to form, so that I felt inspired together with a colleague of mine to create the frame for a new company. Recently, then, the Lemniscate Institute went online, as a virtual space for knowledge workers and cultural creatives to come together to work on solving the bigger innovation challenges of our age.

Among others, we felt inspired by John Hagel, David Snowden, and Richard Florida, and we pay tribute to them on our Campus with links to some of their videos.

We are taking a purposely experimental approach to seeing if we can do a company based on complexity approaches from the start. Initially, as we started constructing the frame, my sense was that we were designing an innovation strategy consultancy. I suspect, however, that something rather different might emerge. But that is the whole point of the experimental approach to the complexity of our world--create boundaries, drop in some catalytic probes, stimulate activity, and know (at least some of) your amplification and dampening strategies for patterns which can emerge. 

Much as we first know what we have written when we read it back to ourselves, we also first find out what the power of an idea is when it is given a form and communicated to others, and we experience the resonance it creates. To help us find out what Lemniscate is, we invited some very bright and creative colleagues from strategy, architecture, innovation, therapy and meditation practices to a first ideas meeting, curious to see who would be inspired and want to participate. The frame triggered interest, but also scepticism to the point of a straight out "I don't believe it" response. I came away feeling sobered at how challenging it is to weave together disparate views and experiences at the level of abstraction at which the frame operates.

More interesting was to experience the feedback after a couple of days, when scepticism turned to deeper interest, as colleages called back individually to talk about next steps.

We are looking forward to seeing what partners set up shop in the environment, and what steps each of us takes, both individually and in synchrony with each other, to live out the ideas involved in the "big shift." 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:36:00 -0700 On the Emptiness of Thinking and the Richness of Experience http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/on-the-emptiness-of-thinking-and-the-richness http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/on-the-emptiness-of-thinking-and-the-richness

Reposted from the Cognitive Edge Guest Blog I am writing this week:

I'd like to comment on Keith's comment about my notion in my first guest post that ideas in themselves are empty. I agree that many ideas lack substance not because they are empty in themselves, but because they have not been fully thought through. Even when they have, however, they remain just ideas. There was a nice report on research into the evolutionary function of reasoning a few months ago, which posited that thinking had developed to win arguments about decisions post factum. My sense that this is true is reinforced whenever I listen to people's opinions (something I try to avoid as much as possible), and get caught up in the infinite progresses and regresses of reason Kant warned us about which they engender (the sound and the fury, signifying nothing, of Shakespeare and Faulkner).

What interests me is the process that takes place prior to thinking. Or, put differently, how thinking might be understood as but the superficial manifestation of physical processes on a higher level of abstraction. When I do change processes in companies, breaking down strategy into practical initiatives is infinitely more difficult (it is logically simple, but never really works) than picking up on the tacit knowledge of the people doing the work, i.e. on their lived experience, and to refine that knowledge into policy and strategy (a lot of hard work, but very fruitful). In this second approach, the priority of experience is respected, and thinking adds refinement and consciousness to what people already know (something which works well as long as it has management buy-in and support).

Thinking that sees its function as making conscious lived experience adds genuine value. It does so by introducing useful distinctions into the undifferentiated mass of experience, thereby giving us influence over what we do. On a second level, thinking allows us to test our distinctions against reality with experiments, which produce second order experience and provide additional food for further refinement through reflection in a trial and error process of conscious evolution.

A colleague of mine likes to make a distinction between "decision" and "decisiveness." Decisions are intellectual. They are usually model-based, and are ultimately inconsequential (or, they often produce catastrophic consequences, but these are usually framed as having been unintentional, showing how irrelevant the thinking which led to them was). Decisiveness is not something we can do, but is much more something that happens to us. I experience it as coming from our tacit knowledge, and it is less something we think about than something which we know. We experience decisive action as deeply embedded in reality, such that reality moves with it of its own accord because, I suspect, our decisiveness is part of that reality. (What exposes pseudo-decisiveness is the way it seems to skip off reality and reveal itself as posturing without connection to any deeper sense of what is needed).

The first ten years of my adult life I spent at York University in Toronto, which at that time had a strong focus on the humanities. The program I was in was called Social and Political Thought, and was a collecting basin for Marxism, Feminism and Post Modernism. I was one of the few people studying classical philosophy, politics and religion, and my take on the intellectual processes around me happened from a certain distance provided by my old fashioned interests.

It was a time in which I believed in the ability of thinking to know truth (a fundamentalist arrogance I put down today to youthful folly and learning). What I took away from the decade was a deep sense of the futility of ideological battle, as it is not amenable to scientific testing and so to resolution beyond agreement on the level of opinion.

What I have come to appreciate and respect deeply is less a thinking about things than the ability to influence them. For example, many managers have theories about leadership, but only few go beyond administration and actually lead organizations to sustainable success. Many therapists talk about neuroses, but only few are genuine healers who enable their clients to change their state. Whether we look at consultants, politicians, military leaders or teachers, there are few whose thinking is so deeply rooted in ability that what they think has any positive transformational effect on what they do.

These are the kinds of people I seek out and, to the extent that I can, strive to be as well. Anyone who has had the good fortune to have a good teacher (I am lucky to have had several) knows the difference. A good teacher's thinking changes you as you follow it.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:28:00 -0700 On the Blind Spot for Complexity http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/on-the-blind-spot-for-complexity http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/on-the-blind-spot-for-complexity

Written in response to a comment on my guest-blog contributions at Cognitive Edge:

I too have been getting questioning looks when I present enthusiastically some insights from complexity theory to clients. To me, at least, it all makes perfect sense, and it takes a serious act of self-distancing to understand the perspectives from which it does not, or is misunderstood. Yesterday I saw a charming ad video by Nilofer Merchant for her last book, The New How, in which she talks about the "air sandwich" which exists in organizations because of the separation of strategy and execution, in which "murder boarding" replaces "white boarding" in the day-to-day operational process of creating value (with great drawings by what I assume is Gaping Void throughout). It is the old story of Tayloristic division of labour we all know, with a novel take. But the blanket education in Tayloristic ideas is not enough to explain the blind spot to complexity we see around us. I suspect there are psychological reasons, for example, in the need of traumatized individuals and communities to stabilize themselves through external systems of order (as opposed to an internal ability to trust in relationships and sense). There are money and power interests, which we learn to become blind to when our living depends on upholding even the most dysfunctional ideas. There are developmental issues, if one thinks in terms of developmental lines, in the ability (or rather inability) of clan or authoritarian social environments to create any connection at all to the dynamics of conscious complex systems. And of course there are ideological reasons, based in belief systems, which can lead to a complete cut-off from reality-based thinking. Often it is just a lack of exposure to the thinking, as most of what determines our everyday experience in the formal context of work gives us no useful experience with complexity approaches.

The result of the many compensatory strategies for many people struggling to make sense of our rapidly changing world is a vast disorientation, in which we tend to hang on the the familiar for want of credible alternatives.

I think that the biggest part of our work lies in finding the "frames" that allow people to relate to emergent processes. People I have found helpful in tilling the soil are John Hagel and John Seely Brown with their Power of Pull, Umair Haque with his New Capitalist Manifesto, and Tapscott and Williams with Macrowikinomics, among others. These are people who are driving a shift in consciousness about how to understand the current challenges, and what they point to we could see as the principles behind complexity (though they don't call it that). For people who have begun to absorb these new perspectives on our reality, complexity provides the nuts and bolts methodology and tools to implement the shift in practice.

I think we need to approach people with helpful overarching frames, before we get into the epistemology and methodology of complexity, or we quickly lose them.

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:40:00 -0700 German Culture and Complexity http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/german-culture-and-complexity http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/german-culture-and-complexity
In a new Vanity Fair article on the role of the Germans in the international financial crisis, Michael Lewis, the author of the trenchant Big Short, reports on an interview road trip he takes to try to understand the character of the people who were on the other side of the Wall Street bets that sent the world economy into crisis. His portrait describes the bankers at state owned banks, who bought huge quantities of junk financial products from Wall Street, as loyal, bureaucratic, and unbelievably trusting and naive. He characterizes the fault which led to the disastrous international investment policies of the Landesbanken in a scatological metaphor which is supposed to show up a general German psychological and cultural orientation to rules-based thinking.

Lewis' metaphor explains certain failures, especially in the political and state bureaucracies, but also misses most of what makes Germany successful (and makes clear how removed Anglo-Saxon instincts are from German attitudes to business). Germans would not have achieved what they did in the last decades if they were just a nation of anal-retentive control freaks. But his story also hits a nerve. As my colleague and I are in the middle of designing a company to bring SenseMaker and complexity approaches to Germany in an innovation context, Lewis' insight into the ordered systems tendency of German culture poses an interesting challenge.

As a rules-based society, Germany has a genuine meritocracy in which good ideas float to the top and people take genuine pleasure in mastering complex challenges to create quality in what they do. For those of us, for example, who have experienced incompetent bureaucracies in other countries, the attention to effectiveness of the German system is a great relief (not to mention the joys provided us by the automobile engineers and the hope created by advanced environmental policy and technology). At the same time, our love of order tends to work against complex decision-making in many contexts. In my experience, rule-based thinking does tend to act as a kind of default preference in the event of crises, even in the face of challenges which are not amenable to optimization approaches.

There is great opportunity in this combination of successful rule-based thinking and the complexity of current challenges. We need only to overcome the bottlenecks in thinking and strategy created by excessive adherence to rules in order to develop the next level of solutions. Our bet is that there are many decision makers who share this insight and are looking for effective methods to help them to proceed. We don't think that this involves a cultural revolution (witness the large number of top level innovators coming out of Germany). Rather, certain levels of complexity first become possible when one has done one's homework on the rules-based levels. In any case, we are very much looking forward to consulting projects we are developing using the insights of complexity theory and methods we have learned at Cognitive Edge.

(This post was also published today at the Cognitive Edge Guest Blog: www.cognitive-edge.com)  

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:05:00 -0700 A Short Meditation on Politics and Creative Destruction http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/a-short-meditation-on-politics-and-creative-d http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/a-short-meditation-on-politics-and-creative-d

Watching the blockade in the US Congress over raising the budget deficit gave me pause to reflect on the nature of the progress of humanity. 

The dishonesty of the debates and their careless use of US solvency to give power to ideological positions made me wonder--briefly--whether it makes sense to believe in human progress at all. As a child of the 70's, I hoped that the US had left such fundamentalism behind it for good--or at least been able to relegate it to the darker corners of its civilization.

Yet the politicians who put on the show are but the representatives of their constituencies. Taking sides (beyond having one's own opinion and values on the issue) gets us nowhere. Both sides of the debate are bankrupt, empty of any ability to reach meaningful consensus on the big issues like finance on which our collective well-being depends. They mirror the emptiness of vision and ideas of the people, and of the monied interests who have power because the people lack the vitality to stop their self-serving actions and integrate them back into a healthy economy and body politic as useful citizens.

This is how paradigms shift, and empires fall.

Yet the conservatives have a special role in the drama, having committed themselves, for want of alternatives for action which could be consistent with their beliefs, to something which smells of a Mephistophelean nihilism:

I am the Spirit that denies!
And justly so: for all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed:
'Twere better, then, were naught created.
Thus, all which you as Sin have rated,--
Destruction,--aught with Evil blent,--
That is my proper element
(Gutenberg Edition of Faust, p. 153)

(Original:
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht, denn alles, was entsteht,
Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht;
Drum besser wär’s, daß nichts entstünde.
So ist denn alles, was ihr Sünde,
Zerstörung, kurz, das Böse nennt
Mein eigentliches Element. (Faust)

Just say no!

Obama's adult reflectiveness has about as much of chance against a believer's "no" as a snowflake in hell. Rationality is not the level on which the debates are being played out.

Where is the silver lining? How can a belief in progress be maintained? Here, I am beginning to believe, Schumpeterian destruction may be afoot on a cultural level. The structures of the mind--both on the left and on the right--which currently determine our responses to the various crises that are upon us are outdated, and have become more of a risk to our endeavors than part of the solution. They must go. But, as Keynes has already noted, "Our difficulty lies not so much in developing good ideas as in escaping from the old ones."

In this sense, the American Republicans may be at the forefront of institutional innovation--just not in the way they think they are. Their ideas and collective will are hastening the downfall of the old order, even as they claim that they are trying to save it. Their stated goal of resurrecting a mythological 18th Century frontier version of minimal government has no hope of realization in the complex world of the 21st Century. But what they will achieve is to bring the edifice of their own beliefs crashing down along with the general destruction they help to bring about.

Though the experience will be painful, mostly in the US, but also far beyond its borders, it may yet be useful. Ideologies whose time has come must collapse from within, by exposing their true nature to the public in the stagelights of their own performance. Perhaps we must accept the inevitability of  the wreckage before the creative space is freed up sufficiently to start rebuilding with sane, sustainable ideas and solutions, made vital by the hard won knowledge of what does not work.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:33:00 -0700 Report on SenseMaking Accreditation at Cognitive Edge http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/sensemaking-accreditation-at-cognitive-edge http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/sensemaking-accreditation-at-cognitive-edge
Amsterdam was beautiful last week, a fitting backdrop to the accreditation course provided by Cognitive Edge that I attended.

Given my last post on the methodology, let me say that my take away was that consulting in the world of complex challenges and strategies is not dead, only different. Dave Snowden's love of both hard science and philosophy was evident in the programme, as the Cognitive Edge colleagues took us through basic principles of complexity theory, narrative and sensemaking, demonstrating the content in facilitation formats which the group worked through at four tables over two days. 

For the analytically inclined, the focus of the methodology on stories and meaning takes some getting used to. Some of the most valuable formats were "anecdote circles" and "ritual dissent," the first of which is used to collect stories, and the second serving to test and enhance proposals, stories or ideas. We had a strong group, so there we lots of stories to go around, even in the artificial training environment where the focus was not on the content, but on methodology.

On a first level of subjective experience, the process was fun. Stories are alive, and the story focus is creative and motivating. The second level I experienced faced me with the challenge of letting go of analytic (pseudo)certainties and allowing myself to rely on the meaning the stories expressed to provide a basis for action. 

Here, the philosophical DNA injected by Dave and his business partner Steve Bealing into the methodology of the programme becomes apparent. I'll give it a shot at a summary: CE gives phenomenology (experience) priority over ontology (categories of being), through an epistemology (theory of knowledge) which relies not on analysis, but on hermeneutics (interpretation). Narratives (fragmented stories) are signified (given meaning) by the storytellers to create an attractor landscape (map of important issues) which decision makers can use to intervene (act).

This strategy is used as an alternative to analysis, which is subject to expert entrainment (first fit pattern recognition based on abstract or outdated solution models). But rather than make analysis superfluous, as I had initially thought, narrative strategy raises the bar on the abilities of decision makers to interpret the sense of the story landscape they are given.

To navigate narrative landscapes successfully—especially when they grow beyond local spaces to take on continental dimensions through the scalability provided by the SenseMaker software—decision makers will need to develop abilities in interpretation we haven't seen represented in our leaders in generations (if ever on this scale). Neither the facilitation process we learned on the first two days of the course, nor the software we got to know on the third day, do the work for us. On the contrary, they provide us with large quantities of signified raw material on a finely granular level to work with, and leaders will have to learn how to make sense of what they are given access to.

Because of this, as consultants we are going to have more, not less to do. Leaders will want to turn to someone to teach them hermeneutical skills (something definitely not taught in business schools), and training will take a new direction. Facilitators skilled in managing the pure process of communication will be given phenomenological material to ground their work in (helping to avoid the nebulousness facilitation processes can fall prey to when they become theoretical or purely psychological). But they will also need the experience to know how to keep discussions about stories from mirroring the fragmentation of the stories themselves, and to boil them down to safe-fail experiments for solutions. Even more importantly, consultants will have to prepare their clients to understand complex strategies approaches in advance of any particular project, as otherwise there will be no basis in a common understanding of the options to get a project off the ground.

A colleague with many years of experience in strategy consulting, who accompanied me to the seminar, reflected over coffee in the evening that interpretation and coaching is what (his kind of) strategy consulting has always been about. Benchmarking, four-field matrices and the myriad of other analytic tools have been but trojan horses used to enter the gates in the walls of scientific management that have been erected around business over the past years, behind which the actual job of decision making and consulting gets done. Especially in the large consultancies, this entry tactic has been confused with the strategic work it is meant to lead to. Billing kpi's destroy not only innovation, but also the good judgement that develops over many years of practice in interpreting complex realities and experimenting with solutions.

The Cognitive Edge approach puts the living, messy reality of human doing at the centre of the management and consulting stage again—and gives us some good approaches to hand to get back to the business of learning good judgment and experimental process in dealing with business, government and social challenges.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:06:00 -0700 Narrative Strategies and the New Approach to Irrationality http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/narrative-strategies-and-the-new-irrationalit http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/narrative-strategies-and-the-new-irrationalit
Enlightenment reason is dead. The final nails in the coffin are being provided by neuroscience, which has made clear that our thinking is embodied (Antonio D'Amasio) and not Cartesian, emotionally inspired and dependent (Daniel Goleman) and not objective, and based on pattern recognition rather than logic. Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) has debunked the premise of homo oeconomicus, or the rational, self-interested economic actor on which economic theory is based, by showing that if we can predict one thing about decision making, it is that thinking is shaped by the forces of emotion, relativity and social norms far more than the other way around.

Yet what we know in advanced research is still a long way from being integrated into the way we act as a society or in business. In a Science and Democracy Lecture  given at the Harvard Graduate School on the role of emotions in politics, policy and life, David Brooks encouraged listeners to learn to love the irrational mind. Colleagues attending, like Steven Pinker, were apparently skeptical, holding on to the notion that trusting irrationality could only lead to bad decisions (like voting for George W. Bush because we would like to have a beer with him!), and that quantifiable measures like IQ were clearly a better indicator of success.

Here we face a gap between what science knows, and how policy is made. I think one reason may lie in a confusion between two notions of irrationality—one pre- and the other post-rational. The one we (justifiably) fear is the pre-rational orientation to superstition, blind faith, unreflected emotion, and the reliance on untrained instinct which invariably expresses itself in the incompetence and corruption that give us poor decisions.

Post-rational thinking, by contrast, simply understands how our brains actually work, and takes this into account. A research colleague of mine here in Germany, Klaus Grochowiak, has come to view the biological functioning of our brains as simply flawed. In an article on the neurobiological aspects of compulsion disorders, he explains, for example, that our dopamine system makes no distinction between sustainable and unsustainable behaviors, rewarding the intake of addictive substances and addictive behaviors as freely as success in achieving goals that improve our lives and our chances of survival. Irrationality is hardwired into the very biology of our brains. Rather than despair at the results of our biological evolution, however, we can celebrate the insights we are developing into the lack of its perfection.

Since it is our very nature, it would seem to be better to understand irrationality than to fight it. For if we can predict the ways in which our brain misleads us into poor decisions, we can design policy to deal wisely with our irrational nature. Just as there are two kinds of irrationality, there are (at least) two kinds of reason, and the two are not equally qualified to deal with irrational complexity. The first is atemporal and is expressed in logic and analysis, and is the objective reason which reached its end in the Enlightenment. The second kind of reason is subjective and narrative, and is expressed in our giving reasons for what we do.

Reasons can be understood. Motives, no matter how "irrational" from a given perspective, can be taken into account. Dealing intelligently with our irrationality is likely the highest expression of reason we are capable of. Narrative strategies show us how to deal rationally with our irrationality. Listening to stories in the context of lived experience gives us the chance to recognize patterns in the stories that make sense of what we perceive. What we can make sense of, we can deal with, though the actions we will need to take will seem counter-intuitive to those identified with pre-rational instinctual approaches to decisions, or planning approaches based on analysis. Narrative approaches to strategy require a new and different skill set:   the trust in the face of uncertainty typical of entrepreneurs, the ability to deal with ambiguity which is a mark of emotional and social intelligence, and good judgement in the face of a broad range of potential solutions to complex problems, to name a few. And it requires a network of relationships in which our stories can be told and understood, and actions be taken to respond to them intelligently.

All of this points in the direction of sense-making as becoming the key ability for developing the successful strategies we need to solve the challenges we face.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:56:00 -0700 The Emergence of Complexity Theory in Consulting http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/the-emergence-of-complexity-theory-in-consult http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/the-emergence-of-complexity-theory-in-consult
During a change project at a car parts supplier a few years ago, a process consulting colleague of mine went off on a rant when he heard that the company had just paid a six figure sum for the months long analysis and report of a strategy consultancy on operational issues in the plant. "Give me full access to talk to managers and employees, and I'll give you 90% of the information in that report and all of the important decision points in four days!" I believed him, having experienced his pragmatic competence and his uncanny ability to intuit when and where to find the key issues in the improvement process as he worked with the people in the company.

Complicated systems analyses are not only expensive, they often miss the point, as the reality they are applied to is complex and unpredictable and not reducible to the results of linear analysis. Most executives I know are aware of the gulf which exists between what analysts say and the way reality behaves. That is why reports are sometimes commissioned to provide secondary rationalization for decisions executives already want to make, based either on their own experience or motivated by political considerations, and as long as shareholders and supervisory boards share a belief in analytic results, they serve their purpose.

Applying systems analysis to complex environments, however, can also lead to catastrophic failure, as we have seen in financial markets when even honest bankers fall prey to the limits of the assumptions on which their system models are based, or in Japan, in which an unexpectedly strong earthquake turned reactor risk management into a disaster which in hindsight seems to have been waiting to happen, or with the Western military response to terrorism, whose violent interventions have served not to diminish radicalization but to foster it.

But despite awareness of the limits of systems analysis, until recently there doesn't seem to have been much of an alternative. One that I have just found, and hope will be very fruitful is the work of Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge. Dave and his colleagues have been working on using complexity theory to translate narrative from any given context through software into objective facts that can be used as a basis for decision making—an approach that promises to close the gap between decision making and reality which our increasingly painful failures in risk management are making obvious.

Some colleagues and I invited Dave for dinner in Frankfurt last week to learn more about his thinking and his software. Dave is taking an open source approach to his services, but in contrast to the prevalent models, the software is proprietary as SaaS, while it is the methodology of complexity theory it is based on which is open source. Dave wants to do for consulting what open source did for software, i.e. to democratize decision making (and make proprietary consulting methodologies and expert approaches within complex environments essentially obsolete!). 

There is no better sensor for understanding the complex human systems we make and live in than our own lived experience. That is why an experienced process consultant like my colleague can sense the neuralgic points in the system by listening to the stories people living in the system tell him. Our brains are pattern recognition organisms, not trivial machines. We perceive elements of the systems we experience, and we connect the dots based on patterns we have learned through our evolutionary development and lived experience better than any purportedly objective model we could invent.

At the same time, however, we are limited in our capacity to know what is important through the way in which we connect the dots: Our brains, David explains, do not connect the dots of our perception through a best fit strategy, but rather latch onto the first pattern they come up with. This is where the Cognitive Edge methodology comes into play. Analysis of a system is done by collecting stories about a particular context one wants to understand. Narrative fragments are then indexed to signifiers designed to frame the questions one wants to put to the system. The storytellers themselves index the key words to the signifiers, cutting out the middle men who would normally do the interviews and analysis as consultants, thereby eliminating the first fit distortions introduced by the consultants' analytic models. Executives who need information on which to base decisions simply click on the signifiers in the user interface in the ongoing report to access the narratives behind the patterns. The software makes vast quantities of information available through the visualization of the valuations of the key words in signifier pairs or triads. The access to experience within the system which the software provides is in real-time. Without the distortions introduced by the experts, executives listen directly to the experience of their people, close the reality gap, and can use their judgement to the greatest possible effect.

Even strong decision makers are doomed to fail when their decisions are based on unrealistic information. What I hope is that the narrative-signifier strategy Cognitive Edge has derived from complexity theory can dramatically improve information quality for my clients. This will not save executives with poor judgement or a political agenda from running us off further cliffs. But a potential side-effect of a narrative information strategy is that bad judgement and its effects will themselves be reflected in the ongoing collection of narratives in real time, so that poor executives will have less places to hide from the consequences of their actions.

For consultants, this means a radical departure from past business models, if we are to have a productive role in future projects. The expert systems approach to consulting looks like it will be coming to an end. For enablers of complexity strategies, on the other hand, there is a world of challenges ahead of us. I'll be attending the next European workshop offered by Cognitive Edge in Amsterdam from May 31st-June2nd, and will report on my insights.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:45:00 -0800 The Psychology of Transformation http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/the-psychology-of-transformation http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/the-psychology-of-transformation
"Alas, two souls beat within my breast!" groans Faust, as he struggles to reconcile competing interests in himself—and so Goethe describes the existential condition of us all: we are not one with ourselves! Personal identity is not monolithic, but is the negotiated result—minute for minute—of a complex relationship of often competing psychological parts within our own self. Skill in managing our internal dialogues and arriving at viable conclusions is the precondition for managing conflicts in our environment. But self-awareness training is not part of our schooling, with the consequence that we live out our unresolved issues unconsciously and mostly destructively with each other in the world.

To the extent that we remain unconscious of the self-divided nature of our human condition, we project internal conflicts onto others and the world, to fight them there as if they had nothing to do with ourselves. That is why so many "wars" are doomed from the start to failure, for the problem to be solved lies not "out there," but rather in the lack of awareness of its causes in ourselves, so that the war is an expression of the problem, not part of the solution. The war on drugs, for example, blinds us to the problems of a society so devoid of meaning that large parts of its population would seek criminal profit or hallucinatory escape from it (witness the destruction of young lives through imprisonment for drug offenses which would be non-issues in other countries). The war on crime lets us act as the just avengers, as if we had no part in creating the criminal environment we feel we need to protect ourselves against (as, for example, the walled-in white enclaves in apartheid South Africa, or gated communities in the US). The war on fundamentalism reverses cause and effect in dealing with the blowback (e.g. Blowback, Chalmers Johnson) we reap from earlier Realpolitik policies of supporting "useful bastards" in the interests of power, about which many people in the world are understandably hostile. The potential list is as endless as the issues facing humanity. We are ourselves the hell we face. Salvation lies not in "winning" whatever war one is in, or in escape to a literal heaven, but in transforming the thoughts and feelings through which we create the world we live in.

The origin of humankind's self-division lies in brain evolution, in which, according to Antonio Damasio, "self" has come to "mind" through the development of consciousness of our body processes. For Damasio, consciousness is a physical event, which would be both inconceivable and meaningless without the body as its basis. Mind strives, like all of unconscious life, to maintain a viable balance in the body in the face of a changing environment--a process which biologists call homeostasis. Our body, for example, maintains an internal temperature of 36.8 °C regardless of external temperatures, adjusting as needed up to temperature limits it can no longer cope with. The "self" Damasio describes takes this life process as a blueprint to the next level of complexity in creating society and culture. Likely, self came to mind as an evolutionary advantage, allowing human beings to engage in farther reaching social relationships which improved our collective chances of survival. As mind strives to maintain physical homeostasis, so the "self" is focussed on maintaning what Damasio calls sociocultural homeostasis.

Where physical homeostasis happens automatically, sociocultural homeostasis requires active intervention. To maintain our collective balance, we must bring what we think, feel, and do, both individually and as a society, into consciousness. Consciousness expresses itself through syntactical language, in which a subject describes its awareness of an objective world separate from itself, and a complex orientation in time, through which we orient our present in a context of our awareness of a past and future. Both syntactical thinking and awareness of time show the ability of consciousness to reflect upon itself as something added on to immediate experience. Even more significantly, consciousness brings with it the ability to intervene in its experience, and so to become an active force in its own evolutionary development.

The moment we become conscious of space and time, we can change what takes place in them. For example, human beings are the only animals that live in two worlds: the world of facts, and the world of meaning. Meaning is generated by the "frame" in which we view facts. As George Lakoff describes, by "reframing" the debate about facts, we change the way we experience them. What happens in time, also, is subject to conscious influence. Not only can we imagine the "future" in a way which will influence the way it becomes, but we can view past experience through "frames" which change our memory of what took place ("it is never too late to have a good childhood").

The world our "self" has created is full of wonders. However, the limits of our practical imagination are also becoming brutally apparent. The world of meaning can become a war zone itself, as conflicting cultural values fight it out over which meanings guide consciousness. Conscious influence over our experience of space and time requires that we take responsibility for creating the sociocultural homeostasis that enables our collective survival and development. Looking at the results we generate, we are but infants in our playing with the frames that determine the way we live (the influence of political action committees, talk radio and television, paid scientific research results, and the marketing of brand illusions are just a few of our failures). 

The problems we are now experiencing globally are a wake-up call to an unconscious society and culture. A path to greater competence lies in learning techniques to constructively change the way in which "self" maintains its balance, and to make them central to our educational programs, leadership training, political processes and social dialogues.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sun, 13 Feb 2011 02:03:53 -0800 Two Planets Meet in Space... http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/two-planets-meet-in-space http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/two-planets-meet-in-space
I saw this somewhere years ago and couldn't find the source anymore, so here is a homemade version. The problem is not so difficult to understand, once we get some distance on it…

2f025009-00db-42fe-acc4-f01203 E5dd61e2-1a4c-4c0a-b6e7-42bac8 Ed41eb4f-b06d-40c1-a966-93cc81
See the full gallery on Posterous

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sat, 12 Feb 2011 12:33:00 -0800 Umair Haque and Saving Capitalism http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/umair-haque-and-saving-capitalism http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/umair-haque-and-saving-capitalism
In an article in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis on the Irish experience of the financial crisis, one biting comment particularly caught my attention: "Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism, the Irish bankers set some kind of record for destruction." What struck me about Ireland in Lewis' analysis is that it expressed in starker terms what has been happening throughout the West. The capitalist system is apparently going the way of its communist nemesis, collapsing under the consequences of its own incompetence and bad will.

This is a time of disillusionment—a good thing if you believe in the healing effects of reality. Those of us who grew up with Milton Friedman were taught to believe that greed did good through the mechanism of the market, which would perform the alchemical wonder of transforming baser human strivings into collective benefit through the vitality of self-regulating economic life. The destructive behaviors of business leaders were punished by the markets, but the system itself was never seen to be at risk. Capitalism was too big to be destroyed—and for a while that belief seemed to hold true. But what has been unthinkable since the 50's is taking on a disturbing reality. The bankers continue unheeded, and the consequences of the socialization of costs of a bankrupt business ideology continue to unfold in the sovereign debt crisis.

One of the most eloquent and passionate critics of the assumptions upon which business is based that I have found these days is Umair Haque. 

Haque's style has much in common with that of a prophet, and his mission is not to bury capitalism, but to save it. The problem, he argues in his book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, lies not in the functioning of markets, but in the "addiction" of business and politics to what he calls "thin value," which is based on maximizing profits by outsourcing costs to people, society and the environment. According to his guiding metaphor, 20th century capitalism lived the life of the explorer in the wilderness, taking from nature's bounty to satisfy its needs, and leaving it to the planet to clean up the mess it had made in the process. Life in the 21st century is fundamentally different. The planet now resembles less an endless wilderness than an ark, where resources are finite, interdependencies between those inhabiting the ark absolute, and the consequences of bad behavior an immediate threat to the survival of all on board. What capitalism needs, Haque argues, is an update of its strivings to the constraints of the modern context. His solution lies in business creating what he calls "thick value," or profits that result from giving back to the collective more than one takes away. The implementation of his recommendations requires nothing less than a complete rethinking of what capitalism is about and how it needs to work if we are to survive its continued operation. Businesses that get it, like those he features in his analysis, will thrive. Those that don't will be eliminated by the demands of the changing market.

Haque's writing is brilliant and charismatic, and what gives his arguments their extraordinary vitality is their focus on "purpose" in a way which until recently has been conspicuously absent in any business thinking that was taken seriously by the mainstream. At the heart of capitalism's failure, Haque argues, is a gaping void of purposelessness, a strategic striving empty of content other than money and power, whose defining characteristic is the very absence of any philosophical commitments which could create sustainable meaning. Salvation, it would seem, lies in a change of mindset about what it is that capitalism is about. Ultimately, it lies in putting business in the service of humanity and the environment, and Haque provides us with a serious model of what the success factors of the new business paradigm should be. 

What is striking about the movement of which Haque is a strong representative is that the malaise he describes is nothing new. Dilbert has been around for decades as a bitter mirror to the suffering masses of cubicle workers. The three things people hate most in their lives in a classical capitalist system are going to work, being at work, and traveling back from work. Managerial success has been guided by incentives which maximize thin value at the expense of employees, society and nature. Where capitalism once lifted masses out of starvation, today it has for a growing majority of people become a living hell, destroying the basis of our collective existence, fulfillment and happiness for the sake of the wealth of a privileged few.

What is new is that people in positions of influence in the old system are beginning to take arguments like Haque's seriously. Perhaps most importantly, I suspect that his lucid style and argument from a standpoint of purpose might strike a chord in the conservative heartland of the old order, whose conversion from a frontier mentality to one of a sustainable common and collective purpose will be key to mastering the challenges we face in the new century.

What I miss in his writings is a discussion of how to deal with the interests of power. Capitalism works today the way it does not through any self-regulating dynamics inherent in its nature, but through its systematic and purposeful distortion to serve the intentions of a small group at the top. Where the rule of law once helped to level the playing field so that excellence and commitment could be rewarded in a meritocratic competition of competence, today influence on the law serves to strengthen forces that diminish competition, support businesses that drain the health and wealth of society, and threaten the biological foundations of our existence.

In the past, as long as things remained fair enough for a broad middle class to live hopeful lives, the power games at the top were tolerable to the majority. But on an ark which faces the hunters at the top with diminishing returns, the middle class has turned to prey. Hunters have traditionally not been very open to changing job descriptions, and, for example, to feel motivated to take up a life of farming. As in Egypt, we may find it increasingly necessary to force destructive actors (which often suffer from master of the universe delusions) to walk the plank. For that we will need more than the markets. This is what Haque sees us experiencing as the "age of dilemma," in which we only have the option of making bad choices within the context of the institiutions which sustain the old system. The biggest challenge we will have to master before 21st century businesses can take off will take an act of collective purpose and political will. We need to create some losers among established business interests so that all of us can win on a larger scale. Creative destruction is not just an economic process, but one we must also confront politically.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sun, 23 Jan 2011 03:00:00 -0800 A Note on Excellence and the Pursuit of Happiness http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/a-note-on-excellence-and-the-pursuit-of-happi http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/a-note-on-excellence-and-the-pursuit-of-happi
An American client working at a German company reflected with me last week on an insight she had come to about working and living in Germany.  What surprised her was how many quietly competent people she encountered around her.  The surprise was less about the competence, than about how excellence happened quietly, as a matter of course.

There is a cultural characteristic that I too experience in German business of preferring substance to stardom. In this largely decentralized country, one travels to small towns spread out through the countryside to discover one world-class small and medium sized enterprise after the next, snuggled away in the hillsides of the Black Forest, along the banks of the Rhein, or at the foothills of the Alps around Munich (to name just a few). These companies have grown and thrived through a passion for quality and excellence in what they do, often over generations of family entrepreneurs.  It is a joke among the Swabians, where Daimler has its roots, that success is not worth mentioning (it is just the result)—it is the practical problems that require our attention! They also have a reputation for being critical and impatient with fluff. It is not about the show, but about long-term development of the company through excellence in products. Respect is gained by being a reliable partner by being good at what you do.

I wonder whether the pursuit of happiness in the US and in many cultures which have followed its example, is not an adolescent fantasy. The go-getter attitude of the frontier was a liberation for emigrants from the dead weight of feudal and religious Europe and Asia, in which the lack of a meritocracy and fair rules made climbing the social ladder through work and creativity most unlikely. The American image as the land of opportunity was a beacon unto the oppressed masses of the world.

But times have changed and values need to shift again. Americans grow up with the Horatio Alger stories of unlimited social mobility for everyone, which, tragically, no longer work. Much more, it strikes me that the myth of stardom and grand success which the stories engender today undermine the striving for mastery, and with it a deeper, more sustainable satisfaction that characterize cultures of excellence.

The crash of the financial system has in part exposed the consequences of the striving for business stardom, with its focus on short-term success through the search for "thin" value. Perhaps it is time to focus more strongly in our businesses again on mastery in the production of genuine, "thick" value (many Germans, too, got caught up in the hype and are paying the price).  What we need is a culture of learning for long-term satisfaction. In the process we will hardly lose our freedom to celebrate and enjoy the happiness of the moment. The deeper flow of being good at what you do, and of living in a society where that is valued—and it pays off!--makes the pursuit of happiness seem like an unnecessarily stressful and futile operation. Cultural maturity, I can report, brings with it its own deeper and sustainable joy.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Sat, 22 Jan 2011 10:00:00 -0800 Rushkoff's Demythologizing of the Marketing of Power http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/demythologizing-the-marketing-of-power http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/demythologizing-the-marketing-of-power
How does "power" sustain itself?  Force is not enough, as the power of its "subjects" to topple power through rebellion is always greater than that of the ruling elite to exercise control, as the Tunesians are currently demonstrating to their escaped and arrested rulers. Power needs the buy-in of its subjects, and one of its strategies to maintain itself is to create myths supporting its brand of centralized control that its subjects believe and buy into. 

In a talk at the Pivot 2010 Conference, Douglas Rushkoff gives us fascinating insight into the struggle between democratic strivings and the interests of power from a marketing perspective. Branding, he explains, has no place in the social conversation.  It is nothing but an instrument of power to intervene in the social process of value creation, and an aid to taking wealth from the real economy and concentrating it in the hands of the dominant class.  

Rushkoff sees the bazaar as an early iteration of social value creation. Real people came together in a marketplace in which conversations about useful ideas (memes) were had in the process of exchanging goods and services directly with each other for the purpose of increasing their common well-being. In Rushkoff's historical analysis, feudal power elites began to experience their superfluity (as a class that created no value in itself), in a world in which the emerging peer-to-peer economy functioned adequately without them.  Social networks were a threat to power already in medieval times, so power interests looked for ways to reassert centralized control through intervention in the social dialogue.  The two instruments through which they were successful were a centralized currency, and the creation of the chartered corporation to subsume productive work, making hierarchy the defining form of the last few hundred years of human society.

Power today is facing a new challenge from social conversations and democratic interaction. The productive, content-based social conversations happening on new bazaar platforms like E-Bay, Craigslist and Twitter are exposing brands as the myths of power they are, and threaten to cut out the intermediating functions in which power interests have created their base.

In the service of their corporate employers, marketing departments are making valiant efforts to redirect conversations in the network from topics of real interest that are taking place between people, to customers paying attention to brands by putting the brands between people in social conversations. 

But Rushkoff says that these attempts are futile and ultimately harmful to the products of the company (to the extent the company has retained any focus on useful products at all). The whole purpose of human conversations, he says, is to enable us to move to a next level of human awareness (in the social mind). We need and look for helpful products and services as we explore, and are happy when we find them.  

Part of our search for useful facts involves undermining and toppling the myths which stand in the way of our progress. I would conclude that companies to succeed need to put themselves in the service of our development. Those that fail to provide us with genuine value on our path, or that even get in the way of our process by using brands to try to reanimate myths of power, will soon not have much reason for being.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:44:00 -0800 Peter Kruse: Transforming Organizations into Social Brains http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/shifting-pattern-formation-in-organizations-t http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/shifting-pattern-formation-in-organizations-t
Though it is useful to benchmark and so strive to match best practices in organizational strategies, learning from others through imitation can also restrict us to the limits inherent in the strategies we copy.  What often prevents students from becoming masters in their own right is the nagging feeling that there is always someone else who will be better at dealing with the unknown beyond the limits of our experience than ourselves.  In business innovation processes, this is expressed in risk avoidance behaviors which take genuinely new insights and impulses to radical innovation and reduce them to safer line extensions to existing products or business models within the boundaries of the existing organization.  For businesses, which depend increasingly on pattern-breaking innovation to succeed, these innovation dynamics can become dangerous.  If we imitate what others do, we get only what others get, and if everyone benchmarks each other, we get a homogenous world, poor in innovation and fighting over market share in a zero-sum game of diminishing returns.

Peter Kruse (part 1 of 7 video), one of Germany's leading figures in trend analysis and organizational development, has coined the term "Next Practice" to describe a way out of the best practice trap.  Originally a researcher and professor of neurophysiology and experimental psychology, Kruse inherited the family business, and started to think about ways he could apply his insights from his scientific research into the brain to the challenges of restructuring a business and making it competitive in the context of the ever increasing complexity of the knowledge economy.

As a researcher, Kruse had come to understand the brain as nature's most successful solution for mastering complexity.  His own solution to the challenges his company presented him with was to view his company as a social brain and to see if he could translate the functional characteristics of the brain into operational principles for organizations, to copy not a particular solution of a brain to a particular problem, but rather to imitate the meta-competence of the brain to innovate when faced with something new.

What makes the brain so successful in dealing with novelty and complexity lies in abilities emerging from its three key functional characteristics: connectivity, arousal and valuation (through pattern formation, or intuition).  Through its neural network (video part 2), the brain communicates with itself in potentially infinitely complex patterns, matching and mirroring the complexity of the world it experiences as it interacts with it through perceptual input and attempts to cope with the stimuli it receives.  Arousal—through e.g. need, interest and emotion—creates activity in the network, causing it to form and reform network connections in response.  Valuation lies in the ability of the brain to recognize patterns in its own neural activity that lie beyond its (very limited) capacity for rational analysis, and that are in some way useful for survival or success.

Transposed to the modern external world, we have connectivity through the Web on a hardware level of cables, EM-waves and processors, and through social media on the relationship level.  Arousal, from sex to cars to politics, to terrorism, animates the network to become active, use existing connections that are beneficial, and create new connections it might need.  Two of the brain's three functional characteristics are present in our collective external reality, and are already strongly developed enough to have begun to function autonomously to create effects which are greater than the sum of their parts.  

The challenge in developing an externalized neural strategy lies in the brain's third functional characteristic of "valuation."  Where the brain learns pattern recognition from the beginning of life, and is masterful in having the preconscious intuitions that are useful for survival (as Malcolm Gladwell shows us in Blink), collective intuition is still in its infancy.  Valuation, however, is where the big added value of a neural strategy lies, something Google was quick to discover and operationalize through search algorithms based on usage popularity and interconnectedness, and which social networks have taken to the next level with social evaluation (here Kruse--part 3, in which he sees absolute limits to the possibility of achieving collective valuation through the social net).

As a scientist, Kruse set himself the goal of making collective intuition measurable, and developed his "Nextpertiser" as a tool of the consultancy that emerged from his initial family business to help clients gain access to collective valuation data.  The results of the analysis of the complex and freehand input that respondents enter into the tool is a three-dimensional values matrix, through which the attitudes and behavioral strategies of potentially very large groups of people are visualized and clustered to generate significant patterns.  Interpretation of the patterns makes them available for policy, strategy and action on a collective level in a way analogous to how the brain uses pattern recognition to steer individual action.  The demonstration in the (German) Web2.0 presentation, e.g. focuses on the collective response to social media, and shows a deep societal division between "digital visitors" and "digital natives," which cuts across all age demographics, showing that even the group of digital natives up to the age of 30 are split down the middle by these values clusters.  Action on marketing, education, research and development, government policy and any other area on which the transition to  Web2.0 and the creative economy (everything!) impinges, can draw great benefit from seeing this pattern and taking this values split into account when developing actions to take.

Some general implications?

Organizations that do not develop connectivity, arousal (or engagement) and collective valuation facility will have a poor chance of survival in the competition with organizations that do.  That includes the organizational approach to strategy, leadership and communication, whose main task will be to enable neural facility (or at the very least not stand in its way!)

Success in the neural world will depend strongly on social empathy and an ability to work with social resonance phenomena, that steer and focus attention and energy through the net (Kruse—part 4).

Effective leadership will operate at the level of "values" (not religious or moral, but as the behavioral strategies people, groups and systems use to master complexity).  One might say that this is another piece of the puzzle showing us that politics in the form of representative democracy will need to be redefined to reflect the ability and demand of citizens to participate more directly in the policy and decision making process (Kruse—part 5).  Another implication is that shareholder capitalism, operating as it does in a vacuum of purpose and values, will have little to stand on in the emerging neural society, and that alternatives to current economic beliefs are needed to keep pace with the infrastructure, dynamics and real-life consequences of a world connected in realtime (here I find myself returning again to Umair Haque and the Capitalist Manifesto for a vision of what it might be).

To round things off, here is the rest of the Kruse interview—part 6, and part 7 (on Obama and the failed great man theory of leadership, net neutrality, and communications quality control on twitter and strengthening the limbic system of the net!).

For German speakers there are links to his presentation on Web2.0 at the Re:publica 2010 conference, a short interview excerpt on how people respond to complexity (a plea for intuition in business!), an explanation of how his "Nextpertizer" tool for measuring "collective intuition" works, and a wonderfully pithy snippet of his testimony before the German Enquete Commission on the implications of Web2.0 and social media for systems of power for the development of Net Policy.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Fri, 24 Dec 2010 13:41:27 -0800 Christmas Flash-Mob http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/christmas-flash-mob http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/christmas-flash-mob How lovely :-)  Courtesy of Heike Hüttner, a dear colleague's Christmas Greeting.  Thanks!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Fri, 24 Dec 2010 07:51:00 -0800 Sustainable Spirituality http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/sustainable-spirituality http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/sustainable-spirituality
There is a taboo in most cultures on critical reflection on spirituality.  Our beliefs are considered sacrosanct, especially when they are supported by established religions, and it is impolite (in many cultures even life threatening) to question their validity.  But not all beliefs are equal.  Some help us to cope with reality better than others, some increase human well-being, while others diminish it.  Some beliefs threaten the very existence of humanity, while very few, if lived to their full, would be sustainable over time, and be so for humanity as a whole. 

In any case, every belief will at some point have its reckoning with reality, and it would seem that a very large proportion of our shared beliefs are facing the most rigorous testing by reality right now. 

A first lesson of the current reality checks is that all fundamental beliefs are wrong.  It is in the nature of fundamentalism to believe that one can know things as they are in themselves, for example a god, an object, an economy, a person, a society or a truth.  It denies the need for interpretation.  What is believed is true, not because it has been tested and found to be viable, but because it is believed.  For fundamental beliefs of all kinds, reality is not a touchstone of validity.  A collapse of the financial markets as a result of fundamentalist economic policy leads to no insight among believers that would change the view of the way markets work.  An aids epidemic in Africa fostered by the rejection of condoms for reasons of religious dogma, or even sexual misconduct of priests on a large scale does not make the Church question its beliefs about the nature of sex.  Fundamental belief is self-sustaining and self-justifying, and is extremely robust in explaining away evidence to the contrary.  But we cannot know things in themselves, as Kant already demonstrated in his Critique of Pure Reason.  To believe that we can is to deny our own role in knowledge, and amounts to an abdication of responsibility for what we think, feel, do and experience to the irrational forces of superstition, ideology and blind faith.

That is not to say that we could do away with belief—a dream the enlightenment philosophers had which ended in the French terror.

Our neurobiology requires beliefs on two levels:  First, consciousness is narrow, apparently operating at a data bandwidth of about 2*10 to the 3rd bits/sec, while perceptual input to unconscious brain functions flows at about 4*10 to the 9th bits/sec.  That means that we are conscious of, and have potential control over only the tiniest part of our experience. Most of our lives run of necessity on automatic pilot, as for example when we drive a car expertly from point A to point B without any detailed memory of how we managed it.

A second level pertains to questions of higher meaning and purpose.  Experiments into the functioning of our temporal lobes done by Michael Persinger in Sudbury, and experiences with temporal lobe siezure patients would indicate that our brain has evolved to create transcendent states of awareness.  Likely this provided some evolutionary benefit in our development, helping us to give our primitive experience an organizing meaning that helped us succeed in life.  But as with so much of our original hardware, what served us well in an earlier and simpler stage of our development becomes a liability today unless we update the way in which we use it.

Just as our capacity for reasoning has had to develop to cope with the challenges of a modern world (and we aren't there by a long-shot yet!), so our spiritual facility must evolve if it is to support our existence in a complex world and not become a problem.  As Ken Wilber describes in his Integral Spirituality, while our cognitive development has been prodigious, the development of our spirituality has not kept pace.  Faith, in the premodern developmental stage it exists in for most believers today, is probably the greatest threat to our existence we know.  If we still thought the way our ancestors did, we would be living in caves and have a 25-year lifespan.  Yet we still by and large have faith the way our ancestors did, as if their way of believing could have eternal validity independent of the complex modern context it is applied in.  Given the technological prowess we have achieved through cognitive development, it is understandably frightening to contemplate nuclear weapons in the service of the beliefs of the Mullah's in Iran or evangelical Christians in the US.

For Wilber, the path forward lies not in reason and science, but with the religions themselves.  He envisions a "great conveyer" of religious development, initiated and run by the religions as they reform their outdated dogmas and bring their notions of spirituality into the modern world.  At present, the Sufi reformers are persecuted by the Muslim fundamentalists, Christian mystics have no voice in the established Catholic and Protestant religions, traditionalists rooted in an ancient mythological consciousness dominate every world religion and hinder development at every turn.

But the dysfunctionally believing majority is under increasing pressure.  People with modern and post-modern sensibilities are trying to satisfy their spiritual needs by strengthening the reformers in the established religious traditions.  Many are attracted to consciousness practices outside any religious traditions, or meditate with teachers versed in Buddhist discipline.  And belief is not just the domain of religions in our modern world, but of every endeavor in our lives.  What of an economics with a core of higher meaning beyond shareholder value and measures like GDP for financial performance, as Umair Haque passionately argues?  Or a political landscape devoted to human well-being, energy security, future generations, quality of life, clean water and the host of other big issues, rather than short-term interests of interest groups and power?

One of Germany's most popular trend analysts, Matthias Horx, describes in his book "Wie wir leben werden (How we will Live)" a potential future political landscape in which parties no longer line up along the outdated right-left split, but reflect the thinking and belief patterns of different developmental levels represented in society.  One group of parties is called the "Reductionists," who yearn for a simpler life and seek simplifying solutions to complex problems.  The other group of parties is called the "Complexists," who embrace complexity and seek solutions that will realize the opportunities complexity presents.

I imagine a Christmas in the future as a celebration of complexity, embedded in an integral spirituality, a period of collective spiritual innovation, generating transformational beliefs upon whose application we collectively reflect.  What a joy!  What a starting point for our New Year's resolutions!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:34:00 -0800 Wikileaks: Sustainability Through Transparency? http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/wikileaks-sustainability-through-transparancy http://sustainability-strategy.posterous.com/wikileaks-sustainability-through-transparancy
That journalism, as the "fourth estate" that was to keep power honest, has lost the focus and influence that defined its societal role became clear after 9/11 and in the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq war, as television and print journalists looked less like independent analysts than interest group spokes people.

Classical journalism adhered to the belief that truth kept politics and business healthy.  That politics and business would one day manage to subsume their controller and make it into an instrument of their interests has come as a shock.  But truth will be out.  Only the media form has changed, and Wikileaks, as one example of web reporting, has come as an even greater shock to the interests of power who thought they had gotten the media under control than the public suffered when the truly investigative traditional channels fell by the wayside.  Attempts to treat web information flows like breaches of security in the traditional sense misunderstand the phenomenon of a knowledge society, as the caricature in a German paper, the Badische Zeitung, shows (Caption: Plague of Wasps - "Hit Them!")

The online petition platform Avaaz.org has already gathered more than 600,000 signatures against the attempts at intimidation against legal journalistic activities and in support of freedom of the press.  The WikiLeaks affair has given the platform a surge of attention.  As with most aspects in life, a swing of the pendulum outside the limits which healthy life can sustain generates compensating feedback to correct the imbalance.  Democracy is coming to politics in a new and more effective form than it has ever been able to before.  And Avaaz and others like it are just getting their feet wet.  Our political institutions and the instincts they have evolved over the last generations do not yet seem to realize that they must serve an entirely new concept of citizenry to remain relevant and useful.

Internet connectivity and social communities would seem to be filling the vacancy in the checks and balances role the old channels created.  But to many who should be relieved at a resurgence of transparency, skepticism and even fear characterize the tone of discussion.  

Mitch Joel, a wonderfully creative and insightful Canadian new media figure I've just discovered at his site TwistImage, reflects in the blog post: 7 lessons that WikiLeaks teaches us:

"The shocking part of WikiLeaks is how everybody else (those who do not understand Internet culture) is reacting to it. They are not used to this type of organization. They are not used to the way it looks. They are not used to the way it feels. It's awkward and because of that, it feels both strange and threatening. It simply validates that we are not ready for the massive changes that are happening and that will continue to happen."

In his Podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, #211, in a small sentence on the side in a conversation with some colleagues over breakfast, one of them describes the value in experiencing interesting people thinking out loud, being invited into the dialogue to understand what animates a social network.  It is the vitality of decentralized thinking that is undermining power, and both politics and businesses will need to reinvent themselves to deal with massively interconnected and iterative information networks—that think, evaluate and respond in real-time, completely outside the constraints that power has built up.  What will real-time democracy look like?  Real-time business or social movements?

We are going to find out!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1354733/IMG_3774__Social_Media_.jpg http://posterous.com/users/3snzsC5y3AUp Tom Klein sustainability-strategy Tom Klein